ADAPTIV

E
LEADER
SHIP

https://
www.leadershipahoy.
com/adaptive-
leadership-what-is-it-
pros-cons-examples/
KALPANA SAHOO
 Leadership is a practice
with and without authority
that mobilizes people and builds capacity
to make progress on adaptive challenges
in order to thrive in a changing and challenging world
Dr. Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky introduced the
adaptive leadership model at Harvard University. Like many
other business leaders, they realized that the single-figure,
top-down leadership model is outdated and impractical.
No single person can solve all of a company’s problems,
which brings in the need for adaptive leadership.
There is no such thing as a leader,” says Hegazy.
“Leadership is an activity, not a position. It is about
mobilizing systemic change.” Everyone, regardless of
their position in an organization or in a social system, is
capable of—and, in fact—has to be able to exercise
leadership

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Define Adaptive Leadership

• SYSTEM-RELATED-many problems people face are embedded in complicated

interactive systems, Problems are embedded,
S connected, & interwoven in a web
of relationships that can evolve and change
• BIOLOGICAL-recognizes that people develop and evolve as a result of having to adapt to
both their internal & external environments
• SERVICE-ORIENTATION-the adaptive leader uses his or her expertise or authority to serve
the people by diagnosing their problems and prescribing possible solutions.
• PSYCHOTHERAPY PERSPECTIVES-learn to distinguish between fantasy and reality, resolve
internal conflicts, and learn new attitudes and behaviors.

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Adaptive Leadership
Principles
 Adaptive leadership is specifically about
change than enables the capacity to thrive.
New environments and new dreams
demand new strategies and abilities, as well
as the leadership to mobilize them.
 According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is
not the most intellectual of the species that
survives; it is not the strongest that survives;
but the species that survives is the one that
is able best to adapt and adjust to the
changing environment in which it finds itself.
 Capacity to sense
 Capacity to respond

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 Key concepts:

1. Age of accelerated advances in

technology and science
• Evolving technology rapidly and we
must move forward with it.

2. Adaptiveness
• Practice of mobilizing people to tackle
tough challenges

3. Agility
• Ensure that the adaptions you have
made are put into practice in changing
circumstances
• Doing agile vs Being Agile

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Factors Affecting Style
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Transformation is about changing the ‘agile being’ side of the equation
Adoption is about changing the ‘agile doing’ side of the equation

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Key Properties of Adaptive Work
Adaptive work demands responses outside the current
repertoire.
Adaptive organizations are interdependent with their
environment.
Sustainable success requires local adaptations to local
environments.
Adaptive solutions are conservative as well as innovative.

The people with the problem are the problem, and the
solution.

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 Adaptive solutions often lie within the society
or organization.

Innovation toward adaptive change is

Key experimental.

Properties Solutions involve direct loss and indirect loss

of as people re-fashion loyalties and develop
new competencies.
Adaptive Adaptive work generates disequilibrium and
Work avoidance because losses generate
resistance.
Adaptive work takes more time than
technical work.

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Management and Leadership
Management mobilizes the efficient coordination of complex technical
problem-solving

Leadership mobilizes adaptive work: honoring the essential, discarding

the expendable, and innovating to build new capacity

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 Operating from Authority Positions
Mode of Operating
Responsibilities Managing Leading
Situation
Technical Adaptive

Direction Define problems Identify adaptive challenges and frame the

and solutions key questions and issues
Protection Shield the organization Let the organization feel external threats
from external threat within a productive range of distress
Order: Restore order Regulate disequilibrium -- within a productive
range

• Orientation Clarify roles and Disorient current roles and resist pressure to
responsibilities orient people to new roles too quickly

• Managing Conflict Reduce conflict Surface and use conflict productively

• Shaping Norms Maintain current norms Challenge unproductive norms or let them be
challenged
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Adaptive Leadership
Principles
 New adaptations significantly displace,
reregulate, and rearrange some old DNA.
Leadership on adaptive challenges generates
loss. Learning is often painful. Leadership
requires the diagnostic ability to recognize these
losses and the predictable defensive patterns of
response that operate at the individual and
systemic levels. It requires know-how to
counteract these patterns.

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Adaptive Change
 People don’t resist change per se.
 People love change when they know it’s a good thing. (No one
gives back a winning lottery ticket.)
 People resist loss. When change involves real or potential loss,
people hold on to what they have and resist the change.
 The common factor generating adaptive failure is resistance to
loss. A key to leadership , then, is the diagnostic capacity to find
out the kinds of losses at stake in a situation.
 Adaptive leadership leadership almost always put you in the
business of assessing, managing, distributing, and providing
contexts for losses that move people through these losses to a
new place.

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 Adaptive Change
 Adaptive leadership is a process of conservation and
loss.
 “Of all that we care about, what must be given up to
survive and thrive going forward?”
 “Of all that we care about, what elements are
essential and must be preserved into the future, or
we will lose precious values, core competencies, and
lose who we are?”
 As in nature, a successful adaption enables an
organization or community to take the best from its
traditions, identify, and history into the future.
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You May Be Facing an Adaptive
Challenge If. . .
 the solution requires operating in a different way than you
do now. . .
 the problem AND the solution require learning. . .
 the solution requires shifting the authority and
responsibility to the people who are actually affected. . .
 the solution requires some sacrifice of your past ways of
working or living. . .
 the solution requires experimenting before you’re sure of
the answer. . .
 the solution will take a long time. . .
 the challenge connects to people’s deeply held values. . .
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 The Adaptive Intervention
Process
1. Observing events and
patterns around you;
2. Interpreting what you are
3. 1. observing (developing
Intervene Observe multiple hypotheses about
what is really going on; and
3. Designing interventions
based on the observations
2. & interpretations to
Interpret address the adaptive
challenge you have
identified.
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Adaptive Leadership Process
1. DISCERN: Are you facing technical problems for
which technical fixes will be appropriate or are
you facing adaptive challenges or are you facing
both?
2. IDENTIFY: What are the significant adaptive
challenges?

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Adaptive Leadership Process
3. INTERPRET: What you are observing about this
adaptive challenge.
 Is there any part of this challenge that is new and that might
need a different strategy than what is usually done?
 Who are the key stakeholders, and how might they be
positively affected or negatively affected? How would they
describe the situation and the stakes for them?
 How generalized is the urgency to do something or do you
have to figure out how to ripen the issue?
 What are the adaptive elements of this challenge/situation,
and what are the technical aspects?
 Is this the only organization facing this challenge/situation?
What responses are others making?
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 Adaptive Leadership Process
4. IDENTIFY
INTERVENTIONS Listen to the
Environment
that could address
the adaptive
challenge.
5. DESIGN Modify
Experiment &
Programs &
INTERVENTIONS Plans
Innovate
based on the
observations &
interpretations to
address the Evaluate &
Learn What
adaptive Works
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 Adaptive Leadership Process
6. THINK HARD ABOUT YOUR FRAMING. Thoughtful
framing means communicating your intervention in a
way that enables group members to understand what
you have in mind, why the intervention is important,
and how they can help carry it out. A well-framed
intervention strikes a chord in people, speaking to their
hopes and fears. It starts where they are, not where you
are. And it inspires them to move forward. Think about
the balance between reaching people above and below
the neck. Some groups and some people need data first,
before the emotion. For others, it is the reverse.
Connect your language to the group’s espoused values
and purpose.
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Adaptive Leadership Process
7. HOLD STEADY. When you have made an
intervention, think of it as having a life of its own.
Do not chase after it. The idea will make its way
through the system, and people will need time to
digest it, think about it, discuss it, and modify it. If
you think of it as “yours,” you are likely to get
overly invested in your own image of it. Once you
have made an intervention, your idea is theirs.
The key is to stay present and keep listening.

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Adaptive Leadership Process
8. ANALYZE THE FACTIONS that begin to emerge. As
people begin to discuss the intervention, pay
attention to who seems engaged, who starts using
the new language or pieces of your idea as if it
were their own. Listen for who resists the idea.
Use these observations to help you see the
contours of the factions that various people
represent on the issue.

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Adaptive Leadership
Process
9. KEEP THE WORK AT THE CENTER OF PEOPLE’S
ATTENTION. Avoiding adaptive work is a
common human response to the prospect of
loss. Avoidance is not shameful; it is just human.
Expect that your team will find ways to avoid
focusing on the adaptive challenge in doing their
diagnosis as well as in taking action. Resistance
to your intervention will have less to do with the
merits of your idea and mostly to do with the
fears of loss your idea generates.

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 Adaptive Leadership Process
 Get allies. You need to share the burden of keeping
the work at the center of people’s attention.
 Understand. Try to understand the impact of new
directions on the constituents behind the people in
your working group, and how the pleasure or
displeasure of those constituents is going to play out
in the behavior of the person. Then think about how
you can help that person with their problem, e.g.,
presenting the idea to their group or making sure the
person receives credit for making the new idea
happen.
 Threat & Loss. To help the members of your team who
are worried about theirkalpana
own Sahoo
people, interpret their
Build an Adaptive Culture
1. Elephants on the table are named.
2. Responsibility for the organization is
shared.
3. Independent judgment is expected.
4. Leadership capacity is developed.
5. Reflection and continuous learning are
institutionalized.

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